The Swimming-Pool Library

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Will goes to an exhibition of photographs by Staines. The theme is soft-core homo-erotica. He is surprised to find Gavin there. Talking with Staines, he discovers that he and Charles have produced three pornographic films of the type that play in the cinema where Will first had sex with Phil. Will talks on the phone with Gavin, his brother in law. Gavin tells Will that he knew it was Will's grandfather who imprisoned Charles. A past perhaps so distant that the archaeologist knows it where the historian does not. to me, the self-relegation of most gay novels between these two categories can be annoying, but i suppose understandable. gays have to come out of the closet and so this intense experience is perfectly paired with the classic coming-of-age tale's structure. and gays are also often rejected by straight society, so why not rejoice in the telling of tales that in turn reject that straight world, that rolls its eyes at it, that have narratives that seem to posit that straights are the actual minority? Swimming-Pool falls squarely within that second category. At the Corry, Will is attracted to Phil, a young bodybuilder. Despite his physique, Phil is shy and a sexual novice. Will suspects that Phil is the man with whom he had sex in the cinema.

I feel like I have nothing to say about this book. Nonetheless I'm going to write a review, because this is what I do. You have been warned. While much of the detail about gay life is surely historically accurate, there is some romanticization of gay society (socialization?) too. I have trouble believing a boys' boarding school was really such a regular orgy of teen boy assignations. Will is a member of the Corinthian Club (‘the Corry’) at which he swims, exercises and cruises men. The Corry is in no formal sense a gay club, indeed it is made clear that there are non-gay members, but there is a pervasive homoerotic atmosphere. Upstairs, he discovers Phil having sex with Bill. Disoriented, he leaves and wanders to James's and then the Corry, where Charles Nantwich reveals his designs in giving Will the diaries. Will and James go to Staines's to see a film, not a piece of pornography but an archive recording of Ronald Firbank in old age. The novel closes. Ah, the infamous first person narrator. I’m in his head without a doubt. He’s a protagonist that's difficult to admire, but have such fun in his company regardless. Will and I could never be friends… or could we? Well, to be honest, I don’t think he’d give me the time of day. I wouldn’t be admitted past the front desk of the Corinthian Club (fondly called the Corry) anyway. Besides, that’s not Hollinghurst’s point here.

Oh, no arrows, dear; it's before the martyrdom. He's quite unpierced. But he looks ready for it, somehow, they way I've done it.' I found Hollinghurst's novel to be very enthralling and wonderfully erotic. It's such a fantastic exploration of what it was like to be a part of the gay community in the early 1980s, before AIDS altered the community and its image forever.

Hollinghurst enjoyed his time at Canford, and wrote enthusiastically about it in the old boys' magazine, the Canfordian, a couple of years ago, recalling with affection two teachers who had opened his mind to poetry, painting and architecture. The critic Peter Parker, who was at school with him, says he "never thought of him as a boy – he always seemed old". Parker recalls that Hollinghurst had a self-deprecating manner and even then his trademark bass voice, and that the poetry he wrote for the magazine Parker founded was mature and fully formed: "I am rather proud to have been his first publisher." I totally loved this book and I wish I could write prose as Hollinghurst. His turn of phrase and excellent use of language is stellar. there was one thing that consistently amused me, in a good way: the effete and fatuous queen of a lead character is also a rough, tough top. i like that! it is always interesting when expectations and stereotypes are subverted. sadly, those instances are the only examples of any kind of subversiveness. Great writing but it felt a bit half-baked at times. Was he trying to touch every base in post-Wilde gay fiction? Does this explain why the story was a little odd at times? In 1988, Edmund White called it, "surely the best book about gay life yet written by an English author." [1] Awards [ edit ]I also felt a certain pride in what I had done, in a British manner wanting it to be communicated, but in silence." In contrast to the excellent Line of Beauty, which takes place at the height of the AIDS epidemic, The Swimming Pool Library is set in the early 1980s at which time it was apparently still possible to have daily unprotected sex with strangers with no adverse physical health effects other than the occasional beating by right-wing skinheads. Not as fun as it sounds if this book is anything to go by. You never stop learning a language, which is why I buy two unabridged English novels from Audible every month and listen to them with as much concentration as I can muster. Style is very important. I don't like to listen to bad style. So I choose very carefully what I listen to. Those books become like voices in my head. I absorb every cadence. I internalise, verbalise and repeat. What's he having?' I said, as I watched the wild pink liquid rattle from the shaker into the inverted cone of the glass. Hollinghurst's hero, Henry James, had three distinct writing periods – early, middle and late. He even seems to have imagined them in capital letters. Does Hollinghurst think in those terms? "No," he says firmly. "That would be insanely self-conscious and self-important. I've always felt I was going gropingly into the future." Yet The Stranger's Child, with its wider canvas, excavation of the past and rumination on whether we can ever really establish the truth, does mark a new chapter. It may not be Middle Hollinghurst, in the sense in which James would have understood it, but it is the work of a middle-aged writer, whereas the four earlier novels were the work of a younger man galvanised by his arrival in London and by exposure to a suddenly more assertive gay world after 10 years doing EngLit at Oxford in the 70s. If, as Schopenhauer said, the first 40 years of life supply the text and the next 30 the commentary on it, Hollinghurst, at 57, is now well into the latter.

Tony, a friend of Harold's whom Arthur believed he had killed in a scuffle, but who is later in the novel revealed to be still alive. From the diaries, Will learns that Nantwich has been to Egypt and then returned to London, where he met with Ronald Firbank: an extraordinary portrait of effete decrepitude, camp and alcoholic. My second Hollinghurst read, this also a book club selection. Hollinghurst is a talented author and that's really what made this book tolerable for me. He has an extensive vocabulary but the text isn't burdened by it. There's a certain scholarly yet approachable cadence to his writing style that resonates with me. Very readable. Primarily a character-driven piece with a suggestion of a plot hanging about. All the hallmarks of the literary fiction genre. In a hilarious, though slightly improbable, conversation between the narrator and his six-year-old nephew, the latter, who apparently has been told that Uncle Will is homosexual without really understanding it, is looking at a photo album and asking questions, concluding "I mean, almost everyone is homosexual, aren't they? Boys, I mean." The reply "I sometimes think so" sums up the spirit of this book in which continuous cruising and brief but torrid affairs are literally the sum total of the narrator's existence (abetted by his independent wealth). The heterosexuals (grandfathers and other necessary progenitors) are quite peripheral. The writing, as I mentioned in my Rabbit Is Rich blurb, has a casual elegant brilliance that quite transcends the subject, though as portrait of gay life, it rivals Andrew Holleran's Dancer From The Dance for entertainment value (and no, Larry Kramer's Faggots is not nearly as good). to me, this sealed the deal on such an eloquent way an otherwise, seemingly trashy novel becomes a timeless work; and in itself, I believe, is something that will be linked to by future novelists

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Hollinghurst's ironies are best enjoyed in longer passages than this. But his ironies would be empty without the delicious observational details – The carpets are beige – I feel an urge to remove my shoes; the walls white; each picture, each object, has its place; a cleaner is doing her weekly rounds – young, dark-haired, Spanish perhaps, the most beautiful cleaner you have ever seen. There is absolute silence, broken only by a loud burst of the overture to Swan Lake on Hollinghurst's mobile phone when his mother calls. As well as Tchaikovsky's lush ballet scores, he has an enduring love of Henry James – there is a bookcase of Jamesiana in his top-floor study. James became his art; forswore life to write perfect fictions. My immediate suspicion is that the pupil is taking the same course as the master, though I accept it is a large thesis to hang on beige furnishings. The story is interestingly told through the eyes of a thirtyish gay man in the prime of his life simply lounging, working out, and having sexual encounters of the various kind. The plot dupes you into regarding the plot as non-existent and that the book will tell the typical tale of a lounger, but the author starts dropping hints to an underlying secret.

Will goes to Phil's hotel. He encounters a rich Argentine who propositions him. Will accepts until he finds that the man is obsessed with gay pornographic conventions, costumes and sex toys. Will finds this all slightly ridiculous and is not aroused. He refuses to consent to sex and leaves.refering to this book that Will's "librarian" friend at the club where he swims "Nigel...had said it was a good one; but I resented its professional neatness and its priapic attempts to win me over. The trouble was that, as attempts, they were half-successful: something in me was pained and removed; but something else, subliterate, responded to the book's bald graffiti" it is clear he pays homage to (or how I say "name-dropping") his inspirations of Firbank and E.M.Forster throughout, his major interest while studying English in school